CHARLES LUDLAM, 44, AVANT-GARDE ARTIST OF THEATER, IS DEAD

By JEREMY GERARD

Published: May 29, 1987

Charles Ludlam, one of the most prolific and flamboyant artists in the theater avant-garde, who seemed to be on the verge of breaking into the mainstream of American culture, died of pneumonia early yesterday. He was 44 years old and had been suffering from AIDS.

Mr. Ludlam's death stunned a theater community that is struggling daily - mostly, until now, in private, personal ways - with the devastation of AIDS. The announcement of his death and the causes was made by his lawyer, Walter Gidaly.

Only last week, Mr. Ludlam sat in his room at St. Vincent's Hospital in Greenwich Village and discussed a production of Shakespeare's ''Titus Andronicus'' with Joseph Papp, producer of the New York Shakespeare Festival. A few days before, he had withdrawn as director of the same play at Mr. Papp's Free Shakespeare in the Park and the producer promised to reserve the play for Mr. Ludlam, perhaps next season, in a space in the Public Theater complex.

Mr. Ludlam had known for just two or three months that he was suffering from AIDS, according to the circle of friends closest to him. For a few days he appeared to have turned the corner, telling a reporter last week that he expected to be released from the hospital shortly. Then his condition quickly worsened, leaving him unable to breathe without a respirator, the victim of a disease that made a formerly healthy man incapable of fighting the pneumonia. AIDS, or acquired immune deficiency syndrome, strips the body of its immunological defenses.

''We lost an extraordinary artist who was just on his way to a tremendous breakthrough in theater and opera,'' Mr. Papp said yesterday.

With a key role in ''The Big Easy,'' a feature film scheduled for summer release, and the prospect of completing ''A Piece of Pure Escapism,'' a major stage project in which he would have played the magician Harry Houdini, Mr. Ludlam seemed ready to move beyond the tiny theaters and faithful audiences that had supported him and into the mainstream.

For two decades, since establishing the Ridiculous Theatrical Company in 1967, Mr. Ludlam recalled the 19th-century theater entrepreneur, producing and directing the plays he wrote and starring in them (often in female as well as male roles) with a company that returned season after season.

He was a master of travesty, creating in a tiny grotto theater on Sheridan Square critically and popularly acclaimed parodies of such familiar genres as the dime novel (''The Mystery of Irma Vep''), film noir (''The Artificial Jungle'') and opera (''Camille,'' ''Der Ring Gott Farblonjet'').

Mr. Ludlam also had an eye for the absurdities of modern life, needling art-as-fashion (''Le Bourgeois Avant-Garde''), psychoanalysis (''Reverse Psychology''), the cult of superstardom (''Galas'') and his own craft (''How to Write a Play''). During its first decade and a half, the Ridiculous presented its most popular works in repertory, a practice Mr. Ludlam abandoned several years ago in favor of doing only new plays.

Mr. Ludlam, who lived in Greenwich Village, was making forays beyond his own theater, as well. In 1984 he played the title role in the American Ibsen Theater production of ''Hedda Gabler'' in Pittsburgh; in August 1985 he staged the American premiere of ''The English Cat,'' by Hans Werner Henze, for the Santa Fe Opera.

''His career was blossoming on so many fronts that he couldn't possibly have accomplished them all,'' Steven Samuels, general manager of the Ridiculous, said yesterday.

The theater was indisputably Mr. Ludlam's most comfortable domain. Though his plays often were characterized by cross-dressing, free use of the double-entendre and comic exaggeration, he resisted attempts to categorize his work as camp.

''One of the problems with accepting a tag like avant-garde or gay theater or neo-post-infra-realism,'' he once said, ''is that you're a bit like an Indian on a reservation selling trinkets to the tourists. You have no real interaction with the culture, and whatever impact you may have had on that culture is nullified.

''If people take the time to come here more than once, they see I don't have an ax to grind even though I do have a mission. That mission is to have a theater that can offer possibilities that aren't being explored elsewhere.'' 'Idiosyncratic' Vision

The first was a tour de force in which Mr. Ludlam and Everett Quinton, an actor who also was his longtime companion, shared a dozen roles.

Frank Rich, chief drama critic of The New York Times, cited it as one of the best plays of 1984, writing, ''Charles Ludlam, cavorting in a wild assortment of roles in the Ridiculous Theatrical Company's ingeniously realized parody, 'The Mystery of Irma Vep,' wasn't just a brilliant quick-change artist. He was also a valiant theatrical renaissance man (star, director, playwright) who has stubbornly pursued an idiosyncratic artistic vision for nearly 20 years - now to arrive at a new creative peak.''

About ''The Artificial Jungle,'' which combined elements of ''Double Indemnity,'' ''The Postman Always Rings Twice'' and ''Little Shop of Horrors,'' among others, Mr. Rich wrote that Mr. Ludlam ''remains our master of the ridiculous, if not yet of suspense.''

Mr. Ludlam was born on April 12, 1943, and raised in Northport, L.I. In 1964 he received a degree in dramatic literature from Hofstra University. He joined John Vaccaro's Playhouse of the Ridiculous before founding his own company in 1967. Early productions by the Ridiculous included ''Conquest of the Universe, or When Queens Collide,'' ''Eunuchs of the Forbidden City,'' ''The Ventriloquist's Wife'' and ''The Enchanted Pig.'' Recent Obie Winner

Not all of Mr. Ludlam's work met with praise. His most controversial show, a 1985 adaptation of Flaubert's ''Salammbo,'' was attacked as lurid and grotesque. The playwright defended the play as being faithful to the novel.

Highly regarded as a teacher, Mr. Ludlam taught or staged productions at New York University, Connecticut College for Women, Yale University and Carnegie-Mellon University. He won fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller and Ford foundations and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts.

Two weeks ago, Mr. Ludlam received a Village Voice Obie award, his fourth, for distinguished achievement. Last year, he won the Rosamund Gilder Award, also for distinguished achievement in the theater.

Mr. Ludlam is survived by his mother, Marjorie, and by two brothers, Donald and Joseph Jr., all of Greenlawn, L.I.

A funeral mass will be held tomorrow at 9:30 A.M. at St. Joseph's Church, Avenue of the Americas at Washington Street, in Greenwich Village. A memorial service is being planned.